coverstory

December 2007

From Soldier to Conscientious Objector
Dan Seifert says the military led him to God. Then God led him out of the military.
by Deona Landes Houff, photography by Woods Pierce

eightyone coverstory december 2007In 1977, Dan Seifert of Hamilton, Ohio, knew what to do. He was graduating from high school, loved aviation, had a family history of military service, and needed money for college. Enlisting in the Air Force was an obvious move.

In 2007, Seifert again knew what to do. He lived in Harrisonburg by then, had joined the National Guard, was studying at Eastern Mennonite Seminary and had figured out the truth about himself: He was no soldier and had no choice but to say so. “What follows is with a sincere desire to be fully honest with myself, the Christian church, and my military unit,” he wrote in his February application for Conscientious Objector (C.O.) status. “After my enlistment, I have become a pacifist which means I have a sincere and fixed belief that war is wrong in any form.”

Seifert understood what his realization might mean to others, especially the veterans he worships with on Sundays at Otterbein Methodist Church. He knew that some will consider him a traitor and a coward. In reality, he quietly says, applying for C.O. status took “more guts than going to war.” Getting it granted, which happened in October, took a scant eight months and wasn’t the long, hostile process he expected. Becoming a C.O. is what took years.

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I grew up with war stories,” Seifert remembers. His grandfather had fought in France in World War II, his father and uncle had served in the naval reserves, and the military was “just part of the American fabric” for Seifert. The Air Force offered him “a good opportunity to grow up.”

“Of course the experience was pretty innocuous,” he says of his duties as an electronics technician. “I didn’t get any kind of dose of a war.” In four years of active duty (1977-81), the closest Seifert got to combat was wearing a chemical mask during training in Germany.

What he did get was God. A nominal Catholic growing up, Seifert was extremely lonely at his base in North Carolina. Some fellow soldiers noticed his crisis and invited him to the church. He fondly remembers those comrades as “great guys, praying for me, interested in me, sort of a community for me.” Most of them were Southern Baptist.

The conversion was dramatic. “I really found out who Jesus Christ was for the first time. And my life changed,” Seifert says. He overcame some mild addictions and “stopped chasing women as hard … I was certainly still interested in that aspect, but it was more wholesome,” he says.

He was happy, with no doubts about the military or the church. After his Air Force stint, he graduated fromTrinity College in Florida and taught middle school. Married by then, he slowly began to get into the pastorate. His Baptist church ordained him. He preached, taught and moved with his family to Richmond in 1986.

But Seifert had become uncomfortable with the Southern Baptist’s legalistic, authoritative approach to worship and to God. Church wasn’t working for him anymore. With four friends, he started Koinonia, a small church that met in homes without heavy pastoral oversight. He was the church’s paid pastor, trained leadership for the smaller groups, and loved it.

“It was experimental, a real community,” he says. But it didn’t last. Free from top-down denominational oversight, the congregation struggled without it. “I guess we became too inward. We just hadn’t really hashed out what I would call a missional niche, something that we were really about that allowed us to exist for the world around us.”

Still, Seifert sees those three years as a victory because “one of the wonderful things that happened in that congregation folks got healing there [from their previous negative church experiences] and were able to move on. Many of them are very powerfully involved in ministry today. There was stuff to be learned [at Koinonia.]”

Victory or not, Seifert did not find a new church. He didn’t want to. He wasn’t angry or tired, just disappointed in what seemed like a failure at the time and confused about the future.

“It some ways church doesn’t exist well for the world around it,” Seifert says. “It becomes too inward. It’s too centralized, too hierarchal, too bureaucratic.”

Koinonia’s 1996 dissolution landed Seifert and his growing family in Harrisonburg, where in 1997 he found work in customer service and sales and avoided the church setting altogether. His interest in theology and communion with God flourished, with private study of Catholic theologians Meister Eckhart and Thomas Merton. Worshiping and reading scripture outside a church “gave me a space to really look within and look without, too, in a fresh way.” He would stay away from church for most of the next five years. The military would bring him back.

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Sept. 11 helped propel Seifert to the Army National Guard in 2002. He’d lost his job after the economic fallout, shared in the nation’s patriotism and grief, and seen the military as he had in 1977: a way to pay for school, in this case seminary at Eastern Mennonite University. Seifert makes no apologies for being using the military’s education benefits. Without those incentives, many people wouldn’t enlist, he says. He sees the incentives as similar to a company offering health insurance to employees: a benefit to reward good work.

Though still unchurched, Seifert enlisted into the Army’s Chaplain Corp to work as a chaplain’s assistant. He was 42 at the time and began drills one weekend a month in preparation for a yearlong security deployment to begin in July 2002. For two months, his unit trained at Fort Dix in New Jersey, and he became increasingly uncomfortable handling firearms. Then his commander told him he would not be serving as a chaplain’s assistant, despite his enlistment agreement, and Seifert found himself in a career crisis that was not about pacifism at that point, but rather a discomfort with not being a chaplain.

He remembers one day especially when “I couldn’t even shoot the weapon and pass. I was just so tense about it.” A fellow soldier from near his Ohio hometown said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll shoot for you. No chaplain’s assistant oughta be doing this stuff.”

“I kept finding these little deliverances, if you will,” Seifert remembers. “This was all part of me just saying ‘I’m just gonna endure this.’ I felt that God was really gonna do something. I didn’t know what.”

The unit moved to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland for the rest of the year to provide security to government and military buildings in the Washington, D.C., area, and almost immediately a chaplain assigned to his unit asked for an assistant. Seifert’s chaplaincy plans worked out after all.

“God truly had done something and at the time, it was huge,” Seifert would later tell Eastern Mennonite High School students in a November presentation. “That year, I was able to practice some level of ministry with units in Maryland, Pennsylvania and the Washington, D.C., region. The work was interesting. I did a lot of listening with soldiers. At the end of the deployment, I was given an award because I was able to identify several suicidal soldiers and help them get the proper treatment.

“However, in spite of some good ministry, underneath I continued to become increasingly uncomfortable with the military culture.”

Seifert came to believe that despite the podium speeches, “what brought meaning for most of the guys was being together as military guys. I rarely heard language about ‘we’re doing this for our country, to protect our country’” from regular soldiers.

“A lot of stuff I heard, a lot of stuff I saw, it just didn’t connect. It seemed a waste for me.”

He didn’t like what he calls the “pervasive smut” of the military culture, including pornography and language that dehumanizes the enemy and degrades women.

“As a genuine person who is seeking to live out the life of Jesus Christ, you don’t live that way,” he says. “Really what God wants is something purer than this.”

The war in Iraq began during Seifert’s deployment and he marked it by visiting a small Methodist chapel in Bel Air, Md., where the worship liturgy grieved the violence of war without getting political. “It filled something in me that I needed,” he says, and he started attending every Sunday evening he wasn’t on the road.

Seifert was back in church. A war was on. Life was going to get even messier.

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When his year as a chaplain’s assistant was over in 2003, Seifert came back to his wife and three kids in Harrisonburg, started working as a youth pastor at Otterbein and enrolled at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. One weekend a month he still served in the guard “doing light ministry,” he says.

Seminary taught him to be critical, to look at things differently. He was consumed with classes, family life, the youth group and weekends with the Guard, all the while with his unease about the military bubbling in the background. Many people at the Seminary – which has a largely Mennonite faculty and an ecumenical student body – spoke of their lifelong pacifism with the ease that most of the rest of the country speaks of war. Seifert’s study of Methodist tradition brought him to a confession of faith that read “war and bloodshed are contrary to the teaching and example of Christ.”

And then talk about his unit’s possible deployment to Iraq or Kuwait surfaced. Seifert had to face whom he had become: someone who wouldn’t fight.

“I wasn’t afraid. I was more than willing to go overseas. But I needed to be honest with the military,” he says. His military contract ran through February 2008, and even after he turned in his application as a C.O. in February 2007, he stopped accepting military money for school but assumed he would go overseas with his unit while his application was processed.

To Seifert’s surprise, his commander said the application document and interviews made sense to him and accurately showed Seifert’s “track record” of service to and discomfort with the military. In the summer, Seifert found out his name was not on the list to go overseas and in October he received official notification of his honorable discharge.

In military interviews, he had to say that no, he would never use a weapon, no matter what. He offered that he’d “absorb the violence” and step in to take a bullet or a knife meant for someone else, but never use one himself. He believes his C.O. process went smoothly because both he and the military handled it with professionalism, respect and sensitivity.

Seifert is careful who he talks to about violence and war, not out of fear but rather a need to have an honest, long conversation, especially with people who have not critically thought about war and violence. He wouldn’t want to be labeled “anti-military,” he says, because he still supports military people. “I love people. They’re not enemies. They’re part of the church I’m a part of. I have every obligation to be a part of their lives.”

Meanwhile, many of his fellow congregants at Otterbein United Methodist, where he is still a member but no longer the youth pastor, have no idea of his C.O. status.

“Pacifism has been part of the church since the very beginnings,” Seifert says. “They’ve gotten away from it. … My position is that what needs to happen is that the church needs to bring some heaven – what is of God – to the earth.” He feels that war and violence directly defy that mission.

Of course soldiers can be Christian, he says. Further, he believes that many non-pacifists don’t really want to fight and do not shoot on the battlefield, citing work by several military scientists, especially Lt. Col. Dave Grossman the writer of “The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.” Even so, Seifert says that violence and war are national addictions, played out in video games and battlefields.

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When Seifert graduates from seminary in April, he does not expect to begin United Methodist ordination or work in a Methodist church. “For what I perceive church to be about, [ordination] works too slow for me. … I’ve got to move on to something else, but I am grateful for the Methodists, their theology.”

He plans to become a middle- or high-school teacher and is thinking of starting a new church, one aimed at the unchurched. “There’s a big shift going on,” he says. “A lot of people are experiencing [that church doesn’t work.] In the emerging church, there’s a big cultural conversation going on among people of all kinds of traditions. I’m a part of that, trying to figure out how to do church today.”

He also hopes to provide a mechanism, perhaps as simple as a blog (he currently blogs at www.gentlecynic.blogspot.com), that highlights alternatives to military service. There are other ways, he says, to find what so many seek from military: meaning in life, discipline, a way out of poverty and money for school.

And he wants to continue working on himself. Being discharged from the military was important but just part of the work he needs to do. “I’ve been mixed up,” he says of his military-churchseminary path. “I have become more angry [at systems and occasionally people] in some ways. I have become more cynical.”

“I don’t necessarily feel comfortable about where I am as a person,” Seifert says. “I’m still working on that, learning to live peaceably with myself and others on a very deep level, learning reconciliation … that project is still going on with me.”